


Home... Again

by agoodwoman



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-09
Updated: 2016-02-09
Packaged: 2018-05-19 09:18:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5962111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agoodwoman/pseuds/agoodwoman





	1. Chapter 1

He’s been there

When she lost her father before she was supposed to realize his mortality.  
When she lost her sister when it should have been her.  
When she lost a daughter that was never meant to be.  
When she discovered she lost any chance of children and he found a glimmering chance of hope.

When she lost him she almost lost herself.

When she gave up their son, he understood because it was their fight that cost them so much.

So tonight he was there for her when she lost her mother and she realized while they only had each other, they were not the last. They had to find William.

Whether it would save themselves or save them all, they had to try.


	2. The Little Ones

When she was in the hospital, with death at her door and cancer filling her body, she asked her mother why she wore the cross she was given at a young age. Beneath the skin of her neck and close to her heart, it represented something she didn’t know she even believed in. By then she didn’t believe in much. 

As she struggled to find meaning, as she rediscovered her faith in a God and all his cruelties, she thumbed it as a reminder of what life wasn’t.

 _Life was not fair, Scout._  Her youth pastor had told her that two days before he was shot and killed on his front lawn. She felt the evil in the world then. She was reminded over the years while working with Mulder these evils. 

These evils were everywhere. They broke into her apartment, they took her off the road late at night in Minneapolis, they put chips in her neck and gave her cancer to make Mulder believe in a lie.

The little questions she wanted to ask were obvious but she needed to hear them. She just wanted more time with her mother. She wanted to ask questions she couldn’t get answers to on her own. She just wanted to hear her mother’s voice tell her things would be okay. She wanted to know her mother forgave her for giving up a grandson she barely got to know. She wanted to find out why things changed for her mother over the years. She wanted to understand why she was destined to a man who believed in everything she didn’t.

Maybe those were big questions but to Scully they felt small. They were little ones because she had pushed them so far down inside herself and repressed every anxious fleeting thought in regards to those answers. They were little because she knew the big truths were Mulder’s to search for.

In the end, all questions were big and small. The answers were there and she had to keep looking.


	3. I Invented It

“Back in the day, did we ever come across the ability to just wish someone back to life?” she asked

“I invented it,” he told her and he was certain he did. “When you were in the hospital… Like this.”

“You’re a dark wizard Mulder,” she teased.

“What else is new?” he said and they shared a laugh. 

It wasn’t inappropriate to find any joy in this moment. When she was in the hospital wishing her to come back to life he was surrounded by the other Scully women. They saw his passion, his care and his absolute need for her to make it through this. Not because he couldn’t take another loss because he couldn’t go on his quest without her at his side. 

If he knew then what he was feeling would lead them down this journey, he wouldn’t have changed a day.

The fire inside of him to find answers and discover truths was only fueled by her pushing him. If he lost her then, he might have not have lived to see thirty five let alone his fifty fifth birthday. 

They didn’t have much experience sitting across from one another, over a patient in a hospital bed. They prepared to mourn one another before they lost so many others. Usually they were gone too soon and Mulder couldn’t harness his dark magic to bring them back. It only worked on his mother for three years and he lost her to her own hand.

He could forgive his mother for taking her own life but he couldn’t forgive God for taking Maggie Scully’s. 

It was all too soon. They were just getting back on better footing. He liked the way she called him Fox and she took him into the fold of the Scully family. He liked that she inspired the strength in her daughters and a will to persevere. 

Scully might have invented the unswaying skeptic but she held truth in what he could do. While she might not believe people could disappear into thin air, she put faith in that Mulder to keep them there, even if it was just for a little longer.  

Mulder worried he used up all his dark magic on her but that was the problem when you needed someone so badly. You knew it wasn’t wasted.


	4. To Philly

The silent echo of the car ride that needed words but they had none. All she had was the radio and Mulder humming quietly. 

He didn’t want to interrupt her thoughts and he didn’t want to force her to talk about what had just happened. He couldn’t. 

For all the years they had known each other, he couldn’t force the feelings out. He couldn’t make her do what she wasn’t ready to do. 

Scullys were stubborn. 

That stubbornness kept a rift between Mulder and Bill Scully Jr. because no matter how happy he made her, Bill would always see what he lost because of him. It created a rift between Charlie and the rest of the family, because he lived his life with no apologies and the Scully children were taught to at least be polite, fall in line, and be good little sailors. The rebellious streak seemed to grow with each child and while Scully’s was tapered with an MD and an FBI badge, she got a thrill out of breaking the rules with Mulder more than she let on. 

He looked over across the car to her and saw her fingering the quarter on the necklace in her right hand with a crumpled Kleenex. He reached across the seat and took her hand in his. She felt cold to touch. 

“Thank you for being there,” she said.

Mulder pulled the car off onto the side of the road and undid his seat belt as he looked at her. “Where else would I be?”

When someone has seen you through every loss, you see them through theirs. Her father, his father, her sister, his mother… and now hers. They’ve lost so much and while they felt they had lost each other, they had to find their way back. Scully shook her head and wiped angrily at a tear that dared to fall.

“I know you wanted to get back to Philly-”

“We’ll get there,” he assured her. 

“There’s no one to bring to justice this time,” she told him as she took off her seat belt. “No one to chase down a dark alley and blame.”

“Why don’t you try to get some sleep and let me curse God for a while.” He told her that once before as she mourned the loss of a patient she was desperately trying to save. It was a bad time for them too. 

Scully reached across the car and pulled Mulder to her. She hugged him as tightly as she could in a luxury SUV and he rubbed her back as the sobs escaped her. This wouldn’t be the only time she would break down. He allowed for the tears to fall until she was too tired to cry anymore. 

He pulled off the shoulder of the road when she was all cried out and at her request, they didn’t mention it. Scullys liked to bury their feelings.


	5. She Wonders

She had been carrying thoughts of William with her since she gave him up and the more she fought them, the more they bubbled up. Sometimes she went days without thinking of how she had to do what she did but then other days, it weighed her down like hundred pound brick. Those days were the hardest to endure alone.

She carried that guilt with her every day. She put it on herself like her necklace and she held onto it with self loathing and frustration. That’s what you do as a mother.

Of all the things she and her mother discussed, their regrets of their sons they lost had never come up. Perhaps that conversation was too painful for both of them to sustain, even together. They lost their sons, Scully lost her brother, Maggie lost her grandchild. It was a lot to feel over Sunday brunch after morning mass. 

When she didn’t want to think of him, she did. In the morning, she found the regret hit her as it tauntingly resurfaced. She had to work hard to push him out of her mind. She had to, to stay sane and to do what she needs to do. To save children born with a disease they couldn’t cure, to fight the conspiracies that beckoned to haunt her, whatever the cause, it was hard to put on armor when your wounds were still bleeding. 

The cut of his loss bled at random times. Sometimes when she heard a baby cry, she had to touch her cross to remind herself it’s not him. It never is. He would be too old for that. When she sees a tall boy with auburn hair at her morning coffee place and her heart aches that it could be him. The off chance his family relocated and they were by chance neighbours. It isn’t. 

So of course she wonders about him and what he’s doing. She worries he feels like something that was unwanted or discarded. She wonders if he has self doubt or if that affects him in his daily life. Does he feel rejected? Does he feel like she didn’t care?

She hopes he knows he was never considered to be trash, garbage thrown away by someone who didn’t want him. 

She will always wonder if he remembers her and what he had before he found a family who could protect him and give him all the things she failed to do. It would be worse if he knew her and resented her for giving him up than to be completely forgotten. To be forgotten would be to know that he lived a life happier without her. 

If Mulder could find the truth behind every global conspiracy, surely she could find their son.


End file.
